Lord Deedes, always known as Bill Deedes, who has died aged 94, was the editor of the Daily Telegraph from 1974 to 1985, and a cabinet minister under Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home in the early 1960s. But Deedes was always more of a journalist than a politician, and it is almost certain that he was happiest in his role as a reporter.

An only son, he had four sisters and came from a family with a tradition of public service. He was very proud of the fact that there had been a Deedes member of parliament in every century since 1600.

His father was a Christian socialist who inherited Saltwood Castle in Kent in 1919 (later the home of Kenneth Clark - Lord Clark of Civilisation) and then lost all his money in the Wall Street crash in 1929. The result was that Deedes had to leave Harrow school a year early with his housemaster offering to lend him "a couple of quid" to help pay for his train fare home.

With an uncle pulling strings, he became a reporter in 1931 on the Morning Post. Four years later he covered Mussolini's Abyssinian war in the company of Evelyn Waugh - reporting for the Daily Mail - and was said to have inspired the character of William Boot in Waugh's 1938 novel Scoop. He gained a more defined place in satirical literature as the "Dear Bill" of Denis Thatcher's fictional golfing letters in Private Eye.

In 1937 the Post and the Daily Telegraph amalgamated, and a year later, having reported on prime minister Neville Chamberlain's "peace for our time" address after the prime minister's meeting with Hitler, wrote the paper's air raid precautions guide - and enlisted in the territorial army. With the war he joined the King's Royal Rifle Corps, winning the MC following an engagement near Hengelo, in Holland a month before VE day in 1945.

Postwar he rejoined the Telegraph, settling on to the Peterborough column. Following the family tradition, Deedes was elected Tory MP for Ashford in 1950, holding the seat until the second election of 1974. He served from 1954 to 1955 as parliamentary secretary in the ministry of housing - "a useful but unappealing experience and, at that time, singularly ill-paid." and from 1955 to 1957 in the Home Office.

In 1962, following the "Night of the Long Knives" - when prime minister Harold Macmillan sought to restore his electoral fortunes by sacking seven ministers - Deedes relectantly became minister without portfolio, required to inform the public about the benefits of life in the European Community. In 1963 he was embroiled in defending the government as the Profumo scandal unfolded. That September he was central to the process which saw the then Lord Home move into the premiership.

In October 1964 the Conservatives were defeated, and Deedes left office, for the last time, and without regret. In the ensuing decade he chaired the select committee on race relations and immigration (1970-74), was vice chairman of the Conservative's home affairs committee, and was also on the committee on drug dependence.

But Deedes hed never stopped being a journalist and it was no surprise when, following the February 1974 election - which the Conservatives lost - he accepted the editorship of the Telegraph. It was, however, an impossible assignment, as the editor had to defer to the proprietor and editor-in-chief, Michael Berrry, Lord Hartwell, while the highly unpopular managing editor, Peter Eastwood, controlled the news pages. Though venerated by a number of young journalists, Deedes was criticised by others for failing to take a tough line.

When the Berrys sold the paper to Conrad Black in 1985, Deedes stayed on under the new editor Max Hastings who took over in 1986, filling in variously as leader writer, columnist and general reporter. It was typical of him that he showed no resentment at this demotion.

In a TV profile produced by Michael Cockerell at the time of his 80th birthday, Deedes recalled his days at Harrow when he fagged for one of the prefects who liked to eat six hard boiled eggs at a go. It gave rise with him to the thought that all his life he had been fagging for various people - Lords Camrose and Hartwell at the Telegraph, Harold Macmillan and latterly Max Hastings - but always cooking his hard boiled eggs with good humour. Even in his old age he seemed prepared to turn his hand to any journalistic assignment he was offered.

At one time he even wrote a regular column for the Sunday Telegraph on lawnmowers and garden machinery. He later contributed a regular Monday column which was generally more readable and pointful than the efforts of various 20 year olds who had been drafted in to attract more young readers to the paper.

He made frequent trips abroad. He chaired the corporate council of Care and visited many stricken parts of Africa - and Bosnia - for the charity from the late 1980s and through the 1990s. He reported from Vietnam and Ethiopia, and on the Princess of Wales's Angola and Bosnia visits which focused on the anti-personnel mine campaign. He wrote extensively about her during thee week of her death.

He was just as capable of covering domestic stories. When my local pub got into the news, thanks to an environmental health officer in the pre-ban era warning to the landlord not to smoke his pipe behind the bar, Deedes was sent down to investigate. He immediately gained the confidence of all concerned, unearthing details which were new, even to me.

Although he mingled easily with the officers and the gentlemen, he preferred life in the ranks. Despite his various honours, including a life peerage in 1986 from Margaret Thatcher, he remained modest, unassuming and universally loved. In that same TV profile he claimed he had only once given offence - when he dared to criticise Anthony Eden's choice of socks in the Telegraph.

A convinced Christian like his father, he lived very unpretentiously on the edge of Romney Marsh, Kent, where his wife, Hilary, kept a menagerie of farm animals. He was never particularly well-off, preferring to use public transport whenever possible.

In speech and mannerisms he recalled the world of PG Wodehouse. He spoke with a curious Churchillian drawl and lisp, which gave rise to the Private Eye catchphrase "shurely shome mishtake - Ed", and used a bizarre vocabulary from another age. He once described how a golf match with the then home secretary William Whitelaw had to be called off when it rained as the security guard was "not properly accoutred".

Telegraph colleagues treasured his malapropisms from the leader writers' conferences: "Callaghan has got to get all his feathers in the air", "the government must nail their matchboxes to the mast on this one". Once he was telling colleagues how he had met Senator Edward Kennedy, finding him a nice enough chap. "But", he added, "one impression doesn't make a swallow."

His comic façade concealed an exceptionally shrewd individual with a particularly keen appreciation of the nuances of the political scene and the way in which the wind was blowing at any particular time. His books included his autobiography, Dear Bill (1997), At War with Waugh: the real story of 'Scoop' (2003), Brief Lives (2004) and Words and Deedes (2006). He also observed that he had no wish to look back over the past, preferring to live in the present. This positive attitude no doubt contributed to his good health and unfailing high spirits.

He had three daughters, Juliet, Jill and Lucy and two sons, one of whom, Jeremy, survives.

· Lord Deedes of Aldington (William Francis Deedes) journalist and politician born June 1 1913; died August 17 2007